Sunday, August 03, 2014

Kevin Drum riffs on Dave Weigel, who noted that all the public knows is that there's a border crisis, Obama is president, and they blame him for not fixing it:

Republicans can basically do anything they want and never get blamed for it. Most voters don't even know who's in control of Congress anyway. When something goes wrong, all they know is (a) something went wrong, and (b) Barack Obama is the president and he should have done something about it.

That being the case, what incentive do Republicans have for making things go right? Pretty much none. This is, roughly speaking, a fairly new insight, and it explains most of what you need to know about American politics in the Obama era.

That's fine insofar as it goes: most Americans tend to see the President as a sort of dictator-god with magic control over the economy and everything else. If things go badly, the President gets the blame. If they go well, (s)he gets the credit.

But the corollary to that is as follows: if an opposition Congress is cynically sabotaging the entire government in order to make the President and his/her party seem weak and ineffectual, then the President's only option legislatively is to do whatever is possible by executive order.

More importantly, though, politically speaking the President has no choice but to drop all pretense of good-faith negotiation and conciliation with Congress, and make it very clear to the American public that (s)he would like to do X, Y, and Z popular thing, but Republicans in Congress stand in the way. As long as nothing is getting done anyway, not a day should go by without that point being made again and again and again. Sure, the Village will get restless and say the gridlock is due to partisan bickering and a lack of "leadership" from the White House--but they're going to say that anyway. Because that's what the Village does, and that's why it's a cancer on the body politic.

There has to be an acknowledgment from the Executive Branch that Republicans in Congress are saboteurs, not legislators. Presidents tend to be reluctant to acknowledge the boundaries of their power so that the public doesn't perceive them as weak. But that ship has sailed. The government's clear inability to accomplish almost anything has already made that case. All that's left is to adjudicate the blame.

There's no reason not to simply come forward with a popular progressive legislative wish list, hold symbolic votes in the Senate, do whatever is possible via Executive Order, watch the lawsuits and impeachment threats roll in, and remind the American public every day through Election Day how Republicans are sabotaging the country.

Now more than ever, the country needs a fighter in the Oval Office--not a conciliator.